More contest winners

We have had two contests since my last posting.The winner of our Auto chop contest was Hitspinner with this entry:

The next contest was called Mixed up Sports and First place was a tie with these entries by Guru and Tara respectively:



A new feature at the site is called "All the news that's not the news".
These are news satire on subjects ranging from politics to current events. Drop by to have a look, a laugh and join in the fun. ChopNCrop.com

Winners and our next contest

Our newest winner is "Trump Distraction by Tara.
This was for our "In The Minds Eye" contest.

Our next contest is to take an automobile picture and alter it any way you want. Paint it, add things to it, whatever you want. here is an example:


Come by chopncrop and check us out or join us for more.
Chopncrop

Winner of our last contest

There was not very much competition in this contest. The winner by default was "Waterbike".
The theme was to do anything you wanted to do to a motorcycle.
Our newest contest is called "In The Minds Eye". Using the phrase "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" let's see what others see. Here is an example to get you started. We are not looking for skill here so don't be afraid to join and enter due to lack of skills. We want humor.

To see more or join go to ChopNCrop.com

Page Rank at Last!

After months of posting on blogs, and essentially ignoring my own, writing articles, social bookmarking, posting in forums and a variety of other things, I have finally cleared a small milestone. Google Page Rank. Yes, I am now somebody!
My landing page has a PR of 3 and my first forum page is PR2. What has this done for my forum? Not much! I still need members. What good is a contest forum when you do not have enough members to compete!
Hopefully this will bring more people by as my positioning in the searches moves closer to the first page.
To all of you who are trying to get better google results I have only a little advise. Keep posting links. It works.

Contest At Chopncrop

At my website Chop N Crop we have a contest going on this week. The members are to take an image of any animal and put it doing something that people would do. We hope this gets the membership a little more active and having fun. Come by, have a look, join up. All are welcome.

One of Those Days

How many times have you had someone say to you "Did you ever have one of those days where..." (fill in the rest with whatever crises has befallen them all day)? I think the most common ending to that is probably "...nothing goes right". Surely something had to go right. Imagine a day where nothing went right.
Alarm clock goes off late. When you finally wake up and realize your late you slip and fall rushing to the bathroom, emptying your bladder upon contact with the floor.
Jump in the shower, hot water knob breaks off so you take a cold shower. Rush out of the shower, put on your clothes, maybe you can still get to work, but you forget about your earlier accident (that you didn't clean up) and slip and fall again, now these clothes are wet and you have to reshower.
Finally getting that out of the way, you go to the kitchen to grab a quick bite to eat. Maybe some toast and juice. Toast burns the first time, of course; next one does ok, you butter it, and promptly drop it buttered side down into the dogs food dish.
Ok forget it. Grab a juice and get going. Head into the garage to start the car that has, you guessed it, a dead battery. No problem though because you have one of those emergency jump start batteries,...still in the original box since you got it as a christmas gift. Never charged up.
So you finally decide to just give up and stay at home. Head back into the kitchen and trip over the dog enjoying a fresh piece of toast. You decide to call in sick; however, your cell phone is broken. (you fell on it after your shower).
Now, given the above is a bit to the extreme, I still believe that nobody has actually had a day where nothing went right. Grab on to one thing a day that does go right and build from there.
Visit:
Chop N Crop
Or My new site:
Homestead Country

Politics

I usually refrain from expressing my views on politics but I'm going to break from that today. There seems to be; at least to me, too much being said about Hillary's "Big lie".
Does the media really believe that she wouldn't lie? I think the only thing suprising to me about it is that it was so blatant! I think they all lie along the way.
Nixon: "I am not a crook"
Ronald Reagan:"We did not -- repeat -- did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages -- nor will we."
Bill Clinton:"I did not have sex with that woman"
George W. Bush: "I am a genius"
OK, the last one is made up! I think if the media would cover just the facts about what the candidates propose and how these differ from the other candidates plans we could get a better idea of whats going on. I know the other stuff is important to judge a persons character and integrity, but with someone like Kennedy sitting on some oversite or ethics committee I don't think the voters really care that much about character.
One senator is all against gays and gets caught soliciting men in a bathroom. I mean come on. Lets get down to the real issues.
Things like:
How much are my taxes going up?
Will there be social security when I'm old?
Where's the beef?
Who framed Roger Rabbit?
IMPORTANT STUFF.

Really, to sum up my political leaning I would say that the person who will not try and be politically correct ALL the time, sticks to their convictions,lies less than the others, and doesn't care if I smoke a cigarette in my own car will probably get my vote.

I think I'll write in Drew Carey.

Bush Monkey

Again At A Loss For Words

2 weeks blogging and the well of ideas seems dry. Still photochopping of course. Below is a pic of a watermill that I added water to. Just playing around at the forum.
Before

Water added

I used a dual brush with white as foreground and blue as background. Then I used the smudge tool to show movement.
Maybe later I will have some great idea to write about slap me in the face. Till then, Keep blogging!

Just Stuff

Not Much To Say Today

Just thought I would show off a few pics I've "chopped". Before:

After:

The Smiling Lion

Bee Bird That's all for today. Keep in touch!

Lessons From The Web: Part 2

Misspelled words

While looking at the Webmaster tools at google I found something interesting. People misspell words in their google searches and if your site has the same misspelling you could actuall get front page listing. One example is "Flaming Text". I misspelled it like this: "Flamming Text" and got on the first page of searches for that word. I do not want people comming to my site thinking I'm illeterate but whatever works, works! Maybe as an experiment i'll make a misspelling here.

Let's try" illetarate" and see how that goes for this blog. Let you know in a later post.

Sad commentary on our society isn't it? So, from now on if you see misspelling on this blog I'm just going to attribute it to trying to get better google results!

My Typing Skills

Just a short note today. My typing skills consist of 2, sometimes 3 fingers, all the while looking at the keyboard. I go back over my masterpiece when I'm done, editing the numerous mistakes I find, and then post. Later I have to go back and edit again and correct mistakes I find.
I have now decided to do the unthinkable. Take it into a word processor and do a spell check. Oh, if I would have had one of those in school. Maybe now it will appear I have just a few more writing skills than I actually do.
I will hang in there and keep blogging!

A trip to Wal Mart

This past week after working on some photo restoration I needed to get some photo print paper. You know, run it through the printer and you get a photograph like print, glossy paper, that stuff. I thought I would go to the local "Wally World" to possibly save a dollor or two.
Parking: 2 miles from the front door, at least it seemed that far, and in every lane I crossed through on my hike to the door someone was arguing, threatning their kids with taking away their new toy they just got if they didn't behave, of their was spilled food and drink to dodge.
Finally inside, parched, I head for the water fountain. Drain stopped up, ready to overflow, I decide I'm not going to be the one to cause the "Clean up on aisle 4" song on the intercom. I get a soda in the entrance way instead.
Now comming back inside they have this big screen TV with a camera on the entrance so you can see they are watching you. I look up, my 3 seconds of fame on television shining back at me, and see this little old lady in one of those powered carts looking over her shoulder heading straight for me. Quickly I jump out of the way and she gave me this look as though I had just spoiled her entire day. Must be a new sport, running people down with a battery powered shopping cart.
I finally get my paper and head to checkout. All the self checkouts are, of course full and have the flashing "help" light going off. No problem I'll just go through the regular checkout. Now, is it a rule in that place that they will not open up a new register until each one has at least 5 people waiting to checkout?
I pick my lane. Years of experience have taught me how to pick the one that will move the fastest. I'm never right but I still cling to that knowledge. In fact most people ask me which lane to go to, I tell them my pick, and they avoid that one like the plague. I guess their years of experience are better than mine.
I then hear a voice, just bareley, but I do hear it saying, "I can help someone over in this lane". Fighting back the urge to run over anyone and anything between me and that voice I head to the newly opened register. BAM! something hits me in the leg. Hard too. I look to see what it was and here is this battery powered shopping cart with the lady who tried to run me down before heading to the register.
I swear she had on a helmet, driving gloves and a three point harness seatbelt on. Not really she actually said "Oops".
The rest of the trip was uneventful but I decided that the 2 bucks I saved by going there was just not worth the effort. It did give me something to write about though!
Here is the picture I worked on. All they wanted was to make it a little clearer. Click for full size:
Before


After

Lessons From The Web

My hobby is Photoshop. I like to take pictures, manipulate them, show them to others, compete in contests etc.. I was content to join websites dedicated to this. There is a plethora of these sites on the web.
After a while though I found a few things I would like to see on one site that was on another; or, I liked one site but elements of it were not to my taste. (Adult content, language,etc..) My solution... Build my own site.
I've worked in HTML and PHP for other people, other websites, and that part of the endeavor did not bother me. Set up the site, do a little tweak here and there, that was the easy part for me!
So I go about downloading free software I would need. There is a large volume of quality software for free out there, and having some programming knowledge goes a long way here. I purchased my domain name and paid for hosting. Set up the site, get everything looking like I want it to and I'm ready to open the doors to the world! Little did I know that the world was going by so fast I had to prop the door open, put up a giant flashing neon sign, have a guy walking around with a sandwich sign, offer up my first born, and hire an accountant to keep up with the who what when where and how of my advertising.
OK, so I exagerate a bit. But just a little bit. I don't have a sandwich sign guy...Yet!
First lesson: Getting Noticed. I start by listing the site in directories. Thats good for links to the site. Will people see them? Probable not. All the other people going to these sites are there for the same reason I'm there. But as I have found out google likes links. Quality links to your site show it's importance and will move you up in their ranking. So I focus on quality links to my site. Sites with good page rank.
Second lesson: Find the right page to list on. The page my link is on is so buried in the bottom of the link pile, on a page that has no page rank, I now have to get a shovel to see the light of day. So listing with directories takes a little more of my time to get better visibility for google and other search engines.
Third Lesson: Myspace. Millions of people. Put up a profile and watch the people come. Well, if I want Tracy, who wants me to see her naked on a webcam, and all her friends as mine, I would have a friends list as long as my arm! You almost have to set your profile to private to prevent these friend requests. That defeats the purpose! Join a myspace group. 14-18 year old kids cussing each other, talking about music groups like "Dez Mane Punkz" and "Dr. Z Roy". Yea, I fit in there like a foot in a glove. Requests in the photoshop forums range from "Can you fix this photo of me so I look like Hillary Duff" to "Make my *&#!!@ girlfriend look like a *&$$@!"
Fourth Lesson: Google doesn't like something about your page. Not enough words (google likes content), The pages look alike so they see it as duplicate content, your keywords are used by 3,505,267 other sites. Gotta change 'em and add content that matches 'em. Google doesn't like keywords not relevant to the site. Oh, and by the way, revisit lesson one again.
Fifth Lesson: Write an article. Get it published. Let others view it, comment on it, look at their articles and do the same for them. Thats ok. I can do that. I even enjoy doing that. It gives me a break from lesson one. I read 12 articles, leave a comment, mine gets read twice and the comments are "Good Info, Read my Stuff here" (with a link of course). That's OK I guess, But then you read their "Stuff" and they don't allow a link in your comments. So I head over to myspace where it's ok to say $&&*! that @$$#*& and I feel better.
Sixth Lesson: Blog. So far this has been the light in an otherwise dim www world! I can vent. I can be creative. I can post my pics that I have Photoshopped. (obligatory pic to follow)




All the while I am providing myself with links to my site, a place to vent, and of course, help with Lesson one. I have also read some very interesting things written by others.
I'm gonna end this now. Hope this has brought a smile to someones face, and besides; I still need to work on Lesson four.

If you like the images seen here there are more at ChopNCrop.com stop by for a laugh.